When it's not following the Constitution and in the BATF's case frequently the law, and the gun owner gets "seized" and imprisoned as well, it's definitely in that direction. And they have regularly and often explicitly decreased the number of legal, licensed gun sellers, that's a pretty big thing, along with a multitude of abusive prosecutions of them.

But as I said, you haven't done your homework, or checked this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6185918 top level comment of mine where I detail some of the more notorious cases:

"Our side can point to kittens killed ("I swear I am not making this up"), pregnant mothers who miscarried, people crippled for life, mothers shot dead while holding a baby (Ruby Ridge, in which the BATF was enlisted to try to force her husband to spy), and many many outright killed (Waco started out as a BATF "ricebowl" operation, they wanted some nice video for their first budget in the Clinton Administration). Plus a constant drumbeat of gun owners ensnared by "flypaper" laws in gun grabbing localities; even NYC has realized it's damaging their tourist industry."

Please do your basic research before making more such howlers.

Those seem like more "weird American law enforcement" things than inherent to gun control. Europe has largely [1] phased out guns in the past 50 years in a much more orderly way. It might not be a good idea that they did so, but it did happen in a pretty sane, non-cowboy, non-BATF sort of way, that I don't think would count as an "atrocity" in the regular sense of the term.

[1] With some exceptions. Carrying guns is still fairly common in sparsely populated rural areas, especially those with bears (northern Norway/Finland/Sweden). And, non-carry possession in the home is common in Switzerland. Switzerland is an interesting case because they cover both extremes: their law combines mandatory universal gun ownership with a very restrictive carry regime that makes it virtually impossible to carry a loaded gun out of the home (and even restricts the transportation of unloaded guns).

Perhaps, I don't pay that close attention to the countries my ancestors left, although I do know there a lot more legal guns owned than you realize, check Wikipedia, plus Germans for some inexplicable reason are thought to have keep possession of ... 26 million? illegal guns. Start e.g. here and note France and Austria as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co... ; dig around in Wikipedia or the sources for official legal vs. estimated illegal.

But irrelevant to my general point of:

Gun grabber atrocities were followed by gun owner political power.

A stark lack of privacy atrocities is correlating with no privacy political power.

WRT of your additions on Switzerland: it's much less universal now, post-Cold War. They only manufactured a bit over 600,000 SIG 550s/Stgw [19]90s for a current population of 8 million. Per Wikipedia the size of the official army is now "about 200,000 personnel, 120,000 receiving periodic military training and 80,000 reservists who have completed their total military training requirements." With a 15 year normal term of service, if they're still following the old pattern of allowing you to buy a converted to semi-auto version of your service rifle when you muster out, quite a few of those have been removed from service.

Seizure of the property of a law-abiding citizen by the government without any just cause is certainly an atrocity, even more - when this property is related to the right specifically mentioned in the Bill of Rights, so important it is.

Indeed, the usual suspects would be up in arms if printing presses (e.g. "high capacity" "assault" fast laser printers) were being seized.

IMHO: Seizure of property is a far greater atrocity than looking through some peoples' emails.